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Yearly Archives: 2014
On Top of Pond Mountain
This weekend I went hiking with my father-in-law, Ken, and my brother-in-law, Jackson. Taking a day trip from Shawnna’s grandfather’s place in West Jefferson, N.C., we traveled to Pond Mountain, a 5,000 foot mountain in a remote part of Ashe County. Heading northwest, where the states of Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia converge, we looked forward to seeing the spectacular view of three states.
Ah, Beautiful Tennova.
Thanks to the efforts of the Blue Ridge Conservancy, 1800 acres of mountaintop land here have been preserved for future generations.
One of the most important things about the Blue Ridge Conservancy’s efforts is the fact that the entire mountain is a major source of water. We found several small ponds on the high ridges of the mountain, and there were numerous small springs bubbling out of the side of the mountain. These springs become the creeks that feed into the New River, one of the oldest rivers in the world. The river flows south to north, just like the Nile.
Pond Mountain was aptly named by Thomas Jefferson’s father, Peter, when he surveyed the North Carolina-Virginia border in the 1700s. I’ve heard that Jefferson’s surveying was slightly off, extending a little bit of North Carolina further north than it should have been. I guess that just means there is more of North Carolina to love now.
Jefferson, along with Joshua Frye, ultimately produced a famous map in 1752, The Fry-Jefferson Map of the Royal Colony of Virginia. Highly influential, this map had serious implications for North Carolina history, as it marked for the first time The Great Wagon Road that thousands of Germans, English and Scot-Irish would take from Pennsylvania to the Yadkin Valley.
As we started hiking up the mountain, we passed fields of Christmas trees. We found more near the summit, and the very top of the mountain was cleared for planting. It made me wonder if they had a partnership with any Christmas tree farmers. After all, this northwestern corner of the state is the Christmas tree capital of the world.
Typical of mountains in this area, we found beautiful grassy balds.
Near the summit we found some stands of Carolina Nightshade, whose yellow
berries were used by the Cherokee Indians for various purposes.
I’ve heard the Cherokee used the nightshade as an antihistamine, a sedative, and a pain reliever for teething babies. I, however, was disappointed that I wasn’t looking at cherry tomatoes. By that time we were getting hungry.
The view at the top was well worth the hike: looking north to Virginia, we could see Whitetop Mountain and Mount Rogers; to the west towards Tennessee, Cherokee National Forest; and to the South and east we saw numerous Ashe and Watauga County Peaks.
We slept well that night!
The Sweet Potato Harvest
Last weekend we dug up a bunch of sweet potatoes and transferred them to the cellar, where they’ll be curing for a few weeks under a fan. If they promise to be sweet enough by Thanksgiving, we just might let them out of the basement for the celebration.
Earlier that afternoon I’d been staring at the pretty greenery of the sweet potato terraces I’d constructed back in the summer. Armed with a shovel, I hesitated for a minute, worrying that I might accidentally cut some of the little beauties open at first strike of the ground. I thought a little blessing might help prevent casualties. May this be a bountiful harvest, I whispered before taking a plunge into the ground. It didn’t work; as soon as my shovel hit the ground, I split a beautiful big sweet potato right in two.
Suddenly it occurred to me that using a hoe might be a much saner approach to harvesting sweet potatoes. It was. From that point on I had fun pulling them out of the ground in one piece.
Next year we hope to get an even bigger yield by using drip irrigation from our rain barrels. This year I found the biggest potatoes in the sections of the terraces where the soil stayed moist. Those potatoes that had the misfortune of being in the under-watered areas suffered. When dry, the sandy loam tends to clump up into little blobs, leaving a little shriveled potato in the mix.
We look forward to dining on sweet potatoes this holiday season.
The Black Squirrel Winter
There’s a rumor going around that 2014 is going to be a dreaded Black Squirrel Winter for the N.C. High Country. I am shocked that, having grown up in Watauga County, N.C., I’m just becoming aware of this phenomenon, what the Native Americans referred to as Black Squirrel Winter or Winter of Sorrows. It sounds so dark and ominous, like the Winter is Coming motto from the George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. In my head I picture the ginger-headed House of Stark-of-the-Blue-Ridge-Escarpment whispering “Beware the Black Squirrel Winter” to one another, warning of the 16-year winter ahead, and the army of black squirrels that prey on human flesh.
The black squirrel is a darker version of the eastern grey squirrel, the result of a mutant pigment gene. They can be described as a melanistic variety. Melanism, of course, is the opposite of albinism. They evolved in old growth forests, which had much darker cover. Deforestation turned these squirrels grey: with the loss of the old growth forests, the black squirrels lost their evolutionary advantage, and grey became a better form of camouflage. Still, they’ve maintained steady populations in different areas of the country, including urban areas like Washington, D.C., where fewer predators make camouflage less essential for survival. They’ve also thrived in colder places like Ontario and the U.S. Northeast because they can retain heat in the winter much better than their grey cousins. This is probably why they don’t mind the unusually brutal North Carolina Winters when we have them.
The Choctaw had stories about the black squirrel being responsible for solar eclipses. Apparently the rodent liked to nibble on the sun. Villagers would try to frighten the squirrel away so that it would stop eating the sun; woman and children would shout and bang pots, while the men shot their weapons into the distance as if hunting for game.
If only frightening the black squirrels away could enlarge the sun, melting all the snow and ice. Winter is coming….
The Gash
I was in the kitchen prepping for a spaghetti dinner when I spied a beautiful string of cherry tomatoes beckoning me from the backyard. I knew they would be a tasty addition to the evening’s meal, and I was so proud of myself for being able to grow my own food. Practically running out of the house towards the tomato patch, my joy turned to horror when I picked up one of the tiny beauties and rolled it over. It was grimacing at me with a huge, angry, gash-of-a-smile. Soon I realized that all the tomatoes in the patch, big or small, were afflicted with cuts of varying pattens.
This has been the story of the summer. (I wish I had a good tomato for everytime one of my Triangle friends complained about their tomato crop this year.) 2014 has been an interesting year weather-wise here in Durham, with some hot dry spells followed by monster downpours. Call it Bull City’s Monsoon Season. From what I understand, it is this disproportionate watering cycle that causes the tomatoes to expand to accommodate the influx of water. When the skin can’t grow enough to hold all the water, it cracks.
Bottom line, tomatoes need consistent watering. This is why they can be so hard to grow, and why some people grow them hydroponically. It has me seriously considering growing them bins or big pots in 2015, using overflow from one of our rain barrels to keep them filled to capacity. If we decide to grow them in the ground again, we’ll probably use slow-drip irrigation from one of our larger rain containers. Increasing the amount of mulch around the plants will also help them retain moisture. Of course, one could always water their tomato plants every day, but what fun is it if you can’t let Nature do part of the work for you?
Lessons from the Incas
This week the Nature Boy is thankful for the ancient Peruvians. Everything
that’s been going on in the backyard lately, they did it first, and better, too. More specifically, I’m referring to my attempts at:
1. Growing (massive amounts of) sweet potatoes
2. Storing, capturing, and distributing water for growing food
This moment of recognition-gratitude came as I gazed out at the terraces I’d constructed on the left side of our sloped backyard. I looked at the sweet potato shoots sprouting out of them, and thought of those tiny tubers growing under the ground. I licked my lips in anticipation of the fall harvest. (My obsession with the sweet potatoes is well-documented.)
The sweet potato was originally cultivated in South America, where remains of Peruvian sweet potatoes have been found going back almost 10,000 years. It has quite a history, but I’m just thankful that it made its way to the North American continent.
Looking at the terraces, I started thinking about the elaborate stone-faced terraces that the Incas constructed on the sides of mountains. They used them for the same reasons I’m using them: to minimize erosion, to capture water for growing food, and to create usable gardening space in a sloped environment.
This week’s trip to the library took me to South America, where I’ve been reading about the history of ancient Andean irrigation systems like the Puquios, a system of aqueducts near Nazca, Peru. It’s been fascinating to read about how people tapped subterranean aquifers to create wells and develop drip irrigation systems.
As for the sweet potato, we’ll probably never know exactly how it got from South America to North Carolina. DeSoto writes about finding them in Louisiana in the 1540s. Several of our regional Indian tribes grew them, including the Creek, Cherokee, Saura, and Tuscarora. Today North Carolina leads the nation in sweet potato production.
Tree Cookies
This month we mourned the passing of this mighty oak, one of the original trees planted on Duke’s West Campus. It was all the buzz in the sociology-psychology building. Sadly, no one could recall the tree’s name. We’ll have to give it the posthumous name of a dead social scientist.
Apparently the tree was terminal, suffering from a deadly fungus, discovered with the aid of sonic tomography. A tomograph is a technology that produces a cross-sectional image of a three dimensional object. In the case of a tooth, or a tree, it lets you see the rot that might not be apparent from the outside. I’ve heard that a lot of the “city” trees in Durham have a lifespan of around 80 years, so I’m not surprised that Duke was monitoring these. West Campus construction started in the 1920s.
All week we watched with fascination and a little sadness as crews worked with a with a giant crane, hoisting huge pieces of the tree over the building into the parking lot on the other side.
By Friday afternoon there was nothing left but a jagged stump.
Although the tree was gone, Duke promised that the good wood from the tree would be repurposed for use at the University and in the Durham community. Soon an e-mail circulated that there were tree cookies available for interested staff. At first I salivated on my keyboard, thinking of the Keebler Elves and their yummy confections. Then I remembered that I’d seen a one a long time ago in a science class. The teacher had shown us a tree cookie–a cross section of a stump or branch–to illustrate how trees grow. I remember counting the rings to figure out how long the tree had lived.
Last week I got the word that there was a tree cookie with my name on it. As I made the rounds, there seemed to be a cookie in every office. Bob Jackson proudly displays his cookie below.
Call me master of the obvious, but this week I’ve been thinking about our attachments to trees and all the reasons we love them–their beauty, their majesty, the cool shade that they provide. Folks on one side of the building have suddenly found that their offices are a lot brighter. It’s sad to think that something that was planted when West Campus was just being built from what was Rigsbee Farm is now no more. Feeling a little sentimental, I started waxing poetic, going back to my favorite nature-poet, Robert Frost. Pausing for a second, I looked down at my desk to realize that I had been using my tree cookie as a coaster. Feeling just a little bit guilty, I wiped off the wetness and placed my cookie next to the window.
Paw, paw, where’s my maw?
This weekend I got to play tree doctor as I performed an IVF procedure in our paw paw patch. Fortunately, the procedure was inexpensive, requiring only a plastic bag and a paint brush, and a knowledge of paw paw anatomy. Paw paws can be tricky to fertilize because they are too stinky for bees, giving off a carrion smell that attracts flies. The flies are supposed to pollinate them, but haven’t been doing a great job. Since our trees haven’t borne any fruit yet, I decided to step in.
Paw paws have an interesting developmental life cycle. When the flowers bloom in the spring, they start out as females. Note the stigma in the middle, which is part of the female anatomy.
After a few weeks, the female flowers morph into males,
becoming “hairy” with a coat of pollen.
The procedure was pretty straightforward: I would take some of the flaky pollen from the male flower of one tree and transplant it to the stigma of the female flower of another tree. Fortunately, I had a few male and female flowers on each tree.
Pretty soon I identified my first male donor. He was ready to go and didn’t need any priming.
My assistant handed me a plastic bag, and I began flaking the pollen off the male flower with a paintbrush, letting the pollen flakes fall into the plastic bag.
Then I went to a neighboring tree to find a female flower. “That’s a very healthy stamen you have, Ms. Paw Paw,” I said reassuringly.
With my artist’s brush I dabbed on the pollen flakes and gently applied them to the stigma of the female plant. We’ll see if anything bears fruit. It’s just a matter of time now…
Birches
Nature is my first love and main source of inspiration. Lately I’ve been trying to express this in paintings. Bored with watercolors, I recently decided to give encaustic painting a try. This is an ancient form of art using hot melted wax with added pigments, and has a very interesting history. The ancient Greeks used beeswax to seal their warships, and it was only a matter of time before they started painting fancy portraits. Check out the Fayum Mummy Potraits from Greco-Roman Egypt. It was a relatively obscure medium until Jasper Johns repopularized it in the 20th century.
This weekend I attended an excellent encaustic workshop at the Durham Arts Council. We spent the first couple of hours learning the ins and outs of encaustic painting. Working off hot pancake griddles, we dipped our brushes in cans of melted beeswax and slopped the first coat on our canvases. For each layer of wax that we applied, we had to fuse it to the canvas using small blowtorches. I mixed the wax with the special encaustic paints right on the griddle. One of the biggest challenges is that the wax tends to harden as soon as it hits the canvas.
I knew exactly what nature scene I had in mind: a forest of birch trees in the snow. Lately I’ve been obssesed with birches. I’m sure Robert Frost would approve. I knew this painting would fit nicely in the jewel-tone blue of our living room. By the end of the day I was pleased with the results.
I realized this was a perfect medium for my nature portraits. The colors were more vibrant than those in my watercolor paintings. The wax layering created an amazing sense of texture too. I had lots of fun creating the dark horizontal lines you always see on birch trees, also known as lenticels. For this, I took an engraving tool and cut right down to the canvas, filling the grooved lines with black ink.
What to paint next?
A walk through Duke Gardens
On Saturday I woke up at the crack of dawn and headed to Duke Gardens. I had a homework assignment due at noon that day for my photography class, and I figured the gardens could provide some interesting subject material. There were snow clouds in the sky, and not a ray of sunshine, which concerned me. As I sipped my morning coffee, I worried that I’d have to use my Photoshop skills to enhance my pictures. Would my instructor notice?
When I arrived, the blue heron was waiting for me, and in perfect position.
Despite the cold and grayness, signs of spring were everywhere.
Seems like the Koi had gotten even bigger since the last time I saw them.
This waterfall wasn’t here the last time I came through with my camera.
I kept roaming, looking for the perfect shot. For a while I had the whole place to myself. The peace and quiet was wonderful.
Next I headed for the bamboo forest on the eastern edge of the gardens.
I thought this bamboo-graffiti would make an interesting subject if I put it in the foreground.
Coming out of the bamboo, I stumbled upon The Charlotte Brody Discovery Garden, a working homestead that includes a transplanted tobacco barn, a vegetable garden, and giant cisterns for water collection. The Brody Garden is one of two pilot projects at Duke that are part of the new Sustainable Sites Initiative (SSI), an international program created to promote sustainable land development and management practices.
Despite some of the primitiveness of the place, the fancy stonework and other stylized elements reminded me that I was still in Duke Gardens.
To my delight, a fancy pergola led me straight to a fancy chicken coop.
At the hen house, it was a veritable chicken potpourri. I counted 5 different breeds.
As I crouched to take some pictures, the chickens came running up to me, hoping that I was delivering their morning breakfast.
Having walked around for a couple of hours, I realized I was famished too, and headed back home for a bowl of oatmeal. I’ll be back to the Discovery Garden soon.
All creatures great and small
Winter Storm Leon moved into Durham last night, dumping several inches of snow along with plummeting temperatures. When I woke up this morning I noticed our feral cats, Sunshine and Gracie, weren’t at their usual spot waiting for me to come out and feed them. I saw their footprints in the snow and followed them to the edge of the pond.
Farthing Pond had completely frozen over for the second time this year. The goldfish were hunkered down at the bottom of the pond, chilling until the next warm spell. I’m sure they’ll surface again if we get any sunshine in February. I decided to bust up the ice so the cats could have a little drinking water.
After a few minutes Gracie decided to come out of her hiding place and have breakfast.
By the time I’d gotten back inside, Shawnna was checking out the bird scene in the front yard. The chickadees, cardinals and wrens were taking advantage of her squirrel-proof bird feeder. Franklin, our indoor tabby, could barely contain himself as he watched behind the screen door, making that funny chattering sound cats make, known as the kill-bite reflex.
We’ve finally decided to join Project Feederwatch, the winter-long survey of birds sponsored by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology. They say that 292 species of birds have been spotted in the Durham area. Our favorite bird from today was a red-bellied woodpecker, who is just a little bit big for the bird feeder, but nevertheless decided to take a stab at it before giving up. Here he is hanging out on the trunk of the big oak tree in the front yard.
The Flowers and the Polar Vortex
I miss the mountains, but living down here in the Triassic Basin has its advantages. The abundant sunshine is good for the soul. I was reminded on Friday of another reason I love living here: the 12-month growing season. After the coldest week we’ve had in a long time, I was astounded to see our daffodils and tulips coming up in the backyard.
Flashback to Monday. Bracing for single-digit temperatures, we left the kitchen faucet dripping. On my daily bike ride into work, I wore ski goggles and four different layers.
And now, a few days later, my grandmother’s daffodils and Shawnna’s tulips are popping up to say hello.
